Move over Barbie: the cool kids are playing with Lego paleontologists

This week, Lego unveiled its first range of female scientists. The set sold out in three days. But is this really the end of the tyranny of pink, when little girls can pretend to be paleontologists instead of princesses?

Girl power … 'even industry hardliners accept that there are trends that are going against the ­over-pinking of girls’ toys'. Photograph: Keith Barraclough / Alamy/Alamy

Now, a word on how this product came about, since it has a bearing on the entire global toy scene. Communications spokesman from Lego HQ, Roar Rude Trangbaek, explained: "As a company, we have had a long history of collaborating with fans and consumers through Lego Ideas. If you have a look, there are over half a million suggestions for products." As a punter, you field an idea, and then you have to get 10,000 "likes" on the website before Lego will consider it, and maybe even make it. Kooijman was up to about 1,500 when the US website A Mighty Girl, who sell "girl-empowering toys", put her idea on their Facebook page. She hit 10,000 likes by the end of that week. After they were released, A Mighty Girl featured the set on their website, and "we were in back orders within three hours," said Carolyn Danckaert, founder of the site. It's a brilliant success for women scientists everywhere. And the fact that they all have loads of slap on is something that only the rudest, most churlish person would ever mention. So of course, I have to mention it.

Me: "Here's the thing, though, Roar: the creator says they shouldn't be wearing lipstick. In fact, her exact words are: 'I strongly discourage wearing makeup in the lab, because it may cause contamination of the samples.'"

Roar: "Well, she also mentioned that that's fair enough. We need to make a product that is appealing to children, because we're a toy manufacturer. So it's a balance between respecting the original idea, and making it fun for children."

So that sounded reasonable. Except – how is it fun for children, when plastic women wear makeup?

In demand … Lego's female astronomer.

"I wasn't the designer sitting in on the product," said Roar.

The toy world is certainly changing. The Disney contribution is an African-American doll called Doc McStuffins, modelled on the TV show of the same name; it (she?) spurred Myiesha Taylor, a doctor in Dallas, to set up a group of female African-American doctors. They were originally called the "We Are Doc McStuffins", now they're called the Artemis Medical Society, and have 2,500 members. Medicine isn't the most radical career suggestion for girls, of course – women now outnumber men in general practice, certainly in the UK. In a lot of careers, the problem isn't access for women, it's access to senior positions, usually due to having taken time out for motherhood. They need a doll holding two baby dolls, still dressed as a doctor. But we can leave that for the next generation of unsexist toys.

Playmobil's offering, meanwhile, are a pair of female judoku, wearing an insane amount of mascara. I suppose the reason I keep banging on about the makeup is that it's hard to tell how sincere the industry is. Does it really believe that the era is over when girls could be told to play with unicorns because science was for boys? Or are they just sick of the online grief they get from well-run campaigns such as Twitter's Let Toys Be Toys? One toy industry insider, who wished to be nameless, said exactly that: "You will be aware that there has been a considerable lobbying exercise around gender stereotyping of toy manufacture and supply. Obviously no industry ignores that sort of lobbying. Some, if they talked candidly, would say that they thought it was misguided, that boys are boys and girls are girls and always have been. But even the hardliners of that position would totally accept that there are trends which are going against the over-pinking of girls' toys." That over-pinking, incidentally, continues unabated: the conversation about toys has changed in a similar way to the one about pornography: rather than concentrating exclusively on what's awful, groups are lobbying, also, for what would be better (this doesn't mean we have to stop complaining, by the way. I would never arrive at a solution that involved no longer complaining).

Anne-Marie Imafidon, technologist, entrepreneur and founder of the Stemettes, a group encouraging women into Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) careers, sees this as essentially a technology story. "It's not boycotts, is it? It's been the social media campaigns. For me, the interesting thing is that it's one thing to say we want to change the toys the girls are playing with. The bigger effect that will mean more, in terms of Stem, will be in the influence on parents. There's a lot of unconscious bias that adults have when dealing with girls." Imafidon was a child prodigy who took her maths and IT GCSEs while she was at primary school. She's still only 24 – so what toys did she play with when she was a kid? And what did she feel most strongly: the lack of female maths role models, or the uninterrupted whiteness of most toys? "For me, it was neither gender nor race. Tim Berners-Lee was my idol growing up. He is neither black nor female. He is British, though. And I do identify very much as a Brit. I didn't really need a Barbie or a Cabbage Patch Doll to be happy. I like to break things and tinker with them. I would take pens apart and put them together again."

Eiman Munro is a UK physicist turned game designer, who has created a number of games – one about careers in Stem, one called Elemons, in which elements are creatures (so hydrogen is Hydromons; it really is fun and educational). She said: "There's a real need for our community to attract as many people as we can into Stem, regardless of gender. We've never tried to focus only on one sex." As soon as you start trying to think of ways for physics to be female, you're buying into the ridiculous agenda that would try to give physics a sex in the first place.

But not everybody is born knowing that they'd be interested in maths or engineering – the art of making a subject enticing might be to give it a human dimension and that, especially for kids, means gendering it. One thing that surprised me about tiny children was how soon they identify as male and female – long before they'd figured anything else out, they were rock solid on that. But it makes sense, because you've got to build an identity somehow, and when you're two, you don't have very much else to go on.

This is how Debbie Sterling described her reason for setting up GoldieBlox, a range of engineering toys centred around a female character, Goldie. "Play and, perhaps more importantly, storytelling, are essential to how children learn about the world around them and learn about themselves. We believe in the idea that if they can see it, they can be it. That's why I created Goldie, the girl inventor, as an accessible role model who isn't perfect and teaches kids it's OK to fail as long as you keep trying."

Frida Kahlo Little Thinker doll … 'it’s equally important for boys to be exposed to these as well … to have a sense of women’s contribution to ­history.'

Carolyn Danckaert, of A Mighty Girl, identifies discreet issues you have to think about when creating toys and books for girls that will inspire rather than limit them. The site promotes role models in the form of Frida Kahlo dolls and Marie Curie finger puppets. "I think it's equally important for boys to be exposed to these sorts of things. It's really important for them to have a sense of women's contribution to history, to know that they can be strong and confident creative characters."

Separate to that, girls have to see themselves as the target audience of a science toy. "One of the problems with science kits is that you always see boys on the packaging, so they essentially make it look like this is a toy for boys," says Danckaert. "And on top of that, they're placed in the boy section of the toy store. Of course, we get detractors, saying there's nothing keeping girls from buying that toy – they can just go to the other section and buy it. And that's true. But it's a little absurd to say that's not keeping girls from buying it."

Danckaert described a wonderful-sounding toy aimed at girls, by a company called Roominate. "Their thing is about reinventing dollhouses so that you can wire your dollhouse. So kids can put motors in them, they can create elevators or windmills or lights." This is the first toy I encountered that made me think, "I would like one of those for me." But I can see, too, that there will feminist purists who'd say you're still gendering childhood with domestication. Why do they have to wire a house? Why can't they wire a car park? It is probably just my internal feminist purist who would say that.

The Mighty Girl site – a community, really, with half a million Facebook followers – has had a huge impact with its online campaigning. A complaint to a clothing company, Lands' End, about a science T-shirt that was detailed and technical for boys, but covered in glitter and dumbed-down for girls, got a response from the company the same day. You can hear in the statement given to me by the Toy Retailers Association that they find this a little irritating: "There is no doubt that gender issues in the nature of toys and the marketing of them are changing. This is part of a wider cultural change rather than the result of campaigning, which often flies in the face of common sense. Boys and girls are different and develop differently. It is no business of a toymaker or seller to ask why that occurs. We simply respond to the needs of our consumers, children, and those who buy for them."

I spoke to Roar Rude Trangbaek about the rest of the Lego canon, in which friendship is characterised as female, and – what I find most dispiriting – there are many more brooms and cleaning implements in the girl's scenes than there are in regular Lego. "I'm sorry, but I don't buy the hypothesis. If you look at Lego play in its essence, it's unisex. The idea of having two bricks and putting them together, that's universally appealing. I can tell you that there are a lot of girls who like to build with Lego Star Wars." So why is friendship female? And why is the female stuff pink? "If you open the box for any Lego Friends set," he said staunchly, "the primary colour may be pink, but there are many bright colours."

I don't think the entire industry is cock-a-hoop about the new direction that it seems to be taking, but there it is: the internet has caught up with them, as it does with everyone, and the customers have spoken. We may be misguided, but they're stuck with us. Whether or not this makes a difference to the way girls perceive themselves, and the ambitions they have, is not really the point. It's better for everyone to live in a world without chauvinism, even if you don't want to be an engineer, or you are more interested in dismantling a pen.

• This article was amended on 11 August to correct the name of the clothing company Lands' End. It was originally referred to as Landmark.